Shh! Twitter Officially Intros Mute Feature

Earlier this month Twitter started testing a new mute feature on mobile devices and, today, it officially is rolling out the option to anyone who uses its iOS and Android apps, or its homepage. Mute is the passive aggressive way to block someone: in your options, you’ll be able to turn off any tweets, retweets or SMS notifications that you might have had active before.

Why bother?

Well, in some cases you might want to remove tweets from your timeline by someone who’s acting particularly annoying, but who isn’t someone you want to unfollow or block permanently. A good example is when someone’s stuck in an airport and thinks they’re the center of the universe. He or she might tweet an update every five minutes, under the false pretense that everyone who follows him or her on Twitter really cares. During such a situation, you could mute that user and then unmute him or her the next day.

Here’s a quick explanation on how you can mute someone:

To mute a user from a Tweet on your iOS or Android device or on Twitter for web tap more and then mute @username. To mute someone from their profile page, tap the gear icon on the page and choose mute @username.

Muted users are still able to interact with your tweets, however, so it’s not the same as blocking someone either. Twitter says muted users won’t know that you’ve muted them, and hopefully someone doesn’t come up with a third party app that exposes everyone soon. You should see the feature immediately on Twitter.com and in Android and iOS once you’ve updated your apps.